I am cutting down my calories at the moment to lose a bit of weight. I had an apple last night for a snack and when I tracked it on my calorie tracker app I realised it was pretty much the same amount of calories as a small chocolate bar. Does this mean that if I’m trying to lose weight I might as well be having the chocolate bar instead?
Obviously there is more fat in a chocolate bar but when I Googled it it said you should focus on calories more than fat
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There was a professor in 2010 that went on a diet that involved less than 2000 kcal per day of mostly snack foods (plus multivitamins, celery, and protein shakes to round things out). He did lose weight over the 2 month period. (searching for “twinkie diet” gets you articles like [this one](https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html))
But.
This was a professor with access to tools that could check his overall health. He stuck to it very specifically for a (relatively) long time. And in the end, he said that this one instance just isn’t enough data to know if this is a ‘correct’ diet.
So in some ways, yes counting calories is what makes weight loss happen. But weight loss isn’t the only purpose of eating, so you should consider the other reasons to eat an apple (fiber and vitamins, for example). And further, the habits people build around eating tend to be a bigger issue with dieting than just calories; eating a chocolate bar in 10 seconds instead of an apple in 5 minutes cause many people to want a second candy bar instead of sticking to the ‘diet’.
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